Welcome to the TDR Course on Implementation Research
What is implementation Research?
Welcome to this Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Implementation Research developed by TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, hosted by the World Health Organization. There is significant research investment in the development of tools and interventions to tackle some of the major public health challenges, particularly in diseases of poverty. There are also funding schemes to address these great challenges of our time, through vaccine and drug development and other innovations that will tackle the causes of disease and ill health.
But an ongoing challenge, for which the current evidence base remains thin, is how to ensure that these solutions, tools, interventions, etc. get to the people who need them, and are used in a manner that results in the outcome for which they are intended. In the absence of effective implementation strategies, the usefulness of otherwise effective solutions is severely curtailed. And yet the importance of implementation research is often underestimated and it is not considered a core part of the research pipeline.
This MOOC provides an ideal opportunity for you to come to grips with implementation research with the expectation that by the end of the course you will be able to design your own implementation research projects, critically evaluate and use the evidence produced by other implementation research projects and commission robustly designed implementation research projects – all of this with the ultimate goal of enhancing the evidence base of effective ways to improve the health of the populations we serve.
What you'll learn
- the core concepts of implementation research
- how to identify the challenges of various contexts
- how to assess the appropriateness of existing implementation strategies
- how to develop innovative and more effective implementation stategies by working with communities and multiple stakeholders
- how to formulate your implementation research question, to operationalize your variables and to design rigorous research projects
- how to define your implementation research outcomes and evaluate the effectiveness of your implementation strategies
- and finally how to plan the scale up of your intervention given a robust implementation strategy
Meet the instructors
Please click on the top menu Instructors tab.
How to navigate through this course
Start the course by clicking on the top menu Course tab
If you are new to edX and would like to learn how to navigate the edX platform, take this fun and interactive demo course designed to help you explore the edX learning experience. It is ideal to take it before you start the MOOC.